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Tyler Hellard sorts out his feelings about small towns and hockey in debut novel Searching for Terry Punchout

Tyler Hellard, author of Searching for Terry Punchout

Jon Roe

Published: November 30, 2018 - 8:09 AM

Tyler Hellard grew up in Summerside, a city of just under 15,000 located northwest of the Confederation Bridge on Prince Edward Island. Though it provides the Calgary author with plenty of place for his debut novel, Searching for Terry Punchout, it didn’t provide many fond memories from his youth.

“I hated it a lot,” he says. “Growing up, I was uncomfortable there, and then as soon as I could go away to school, I did. I came home one summer and was like, that’s it.”

He went to St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, N.S. and stayed to work during summers instead of returning home. Then he moved to Halifax and finally Calgary, working in copywriting after university.

The main character of Searching for Terry Punchout followed a Hellard-esque path. Adam Macallister left the fictional small town of Pennington, N.S., for the big city of Calgary. He returns to write a magazine profile of his father Terry, the mythical NHL pugilist Terry Punchout, who set the record in penalty minutes before vanishing from the public eye.

“I was looking at hockey biographies and I thought it’d be funny if someone did one of these on a goon,” Hellard says, adding he borrowed the title from Stephen Brunt’s Searching for Bobby Orr. “I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I thought I wanted to write about being from a small town and hating it. Then I merged the two.”

The result is a brisk debut that blends family, sports and reconciling yourself with the people and place you grew up with. Hellard began writing it five years ago and worked on it in fits and starts, mostly on weekends, often at Swans of Inglewood. Despite being a career writer, he found writing a novel a completely different beast.

“I didn’t know how to write a novel,” he says. “I had been writing professionally for 10 years at that point and I had no idea how to do it.”

So he turned to a local resource: the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society, which was based in Inglewood at the time but has since moved to Marda Loop. There, he took classes and found a group of writers to help him out.

“The advice that the hardest part of writing a book is writing is true,” Hellard says. “People talk about coming up with an idea for a book, that it’s hard, but no, everyone has good ideas for books. Actually just sitting down and figuring out how to do it takes the most time and is the most frustrating part.”

Hellard’s ideas were pulled liberally from the people and places he knew in Summerside and Antigonish. Though there are no one-to-one people-to-characters in the book — “each character is a makeup of different people,” he says — he was concerned he might anger people in Summerside. He gave the novel to his closest Summerside friend to read.

“He thought it was fine,” Hellard says. “He was like ‘It’s definitely Summerside.’ That means inventing a fake Nova Scotia town was a bit gutless on my part.”

But it turns out inventing a fake Prince Edward Island town is much more difficult.

“It’s really hard to hide 8,000 people in P.E.I. because it’s so small. P.E.I. and Nova Scotia are a lot the same: they have the same area code. I’ve lived in both,” Hellard says. “There’s similarities.”

The life of fictional Pennington, much like Summerside, is centred on hockey. The titular Terry Punchout returned a hero, but now lives as more of a joke among the populace after his record-setting NHL career as a goon. His son Adam returns on the eve of Terry’s record being broken. Fighting in hockey plays a central role in the novel, and Hellard is of two minds when it comes to its current place in the game.

“If I’m at a game and people drop the gloves, I get very excited. And if they said tomorrow (that) we’re banning fighting from hockey, I’d say that’s a really good idea, you should definitely ban fighting from hockey,” Hellard says. “I’m like anyone, I get a little blood lust but I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think grown men should be punching each other in the head, even in a sports context. I think it’s kind of dumb and dangerous.”

The novel is more ambiguous.

“I didn’t try to take a side on it in the book,” he adds. “I wanted to be what it is: people enjoy it. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do.”

Instead, it’s more about the characters and the effects of a professional career which pulls a father away from a son, and what happens when they reconnect. And what happens when a 40-year-old author reconciles with his own small-town upbringing.

“I spent my 20s being like ‘that place is terrible, I’m so glad I got out,’ and kind of being a jerk about the people who decided to stay,” Hellard says. “It wasn’t them, it was me, and being 20 and being an a——. As I matured, I worked out that that place isn’t bad, those people are very good, nice people and sort of made my peace with it. I definitely did not like being from there and writing this was sort of me working that out.”